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› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Look, I tried — as much as any 35-year-old can be expected to try — to get excited by, or even minimally interested in, the Warped Tour. Excuse me — what I mean is the Vans Warped Tour, featuring the Volcom Stage, and the Guitar Center Warp Your Summer with NOFX contest, and the Energizer Encore, wherein you can vote to see your favorite Warped band play 10 minutes longer. Why, if I could only see Davey Havok's frontal mullet, Cure fan circa ’86 hairdo for one-sixth of an hour longer, I think I'd need to change my underwear. Oh, wait — AFI aren’t playing? Read more »

› a&eletters@sfbg.com We're living in a golden age of commercial radio in the Bay Area: It's now possible to hear "Brandy" by Looking Glass on at least four stations. Ladies and gentlemen, meet 95.7 Max FM, the station that plays whatever it wants, whenever it feels like it, as long as it was a Top 40 hit between 1970 and 1995. Max FM, the station that never plays the same song in the same day, as long as you don't consider John Cougar Mellencamp's "R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A." and Huey Lewis and the News' "The Heart of Rock ’n' Roll" to be the same song. Read more »

› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Wassup Lauryn Hill? Well apparently she's been busy morphing into Sun Ra.
A staight-skankin', massive fro–sportin', partyin'-with-Method-Man-at-the-Clift-Hotel, "la, la, la, la"-ing Sun Ra.
The lady had about 13 people onstage at Great American Music Hall on June 29 for two last-minute "rehearsal" sets: two drummers, two keyboardists, at least three guitarists, the works. Read more »

SUPER EGO "I'm from Indiana," confided the partly melted drag queen, after nailing "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" in a wicked patent-leather Duchess of Spades dress. "You know we do things different out there. I just got here a couple weeks ago, and when I first pulled my hair out the box, the other girls asked if it was three wigs or one."

The reasons were manifold, many-furred, and multihued, but this much was clear at South by Southwest 2006: The Nashville teen punk sensations Be Your Own Pet were definitely a band to raise your right fist Arsenio-style and woof at, like a member of the Bloodhound Gang at a sports bar. Read more »

› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Zakk Wylde is a postmodern metal god. Or perhaps a modern post-metal god. With his long, flowing hair and beard, bulging muscles, and Les Paul wielded like a battle ax, he is a figure straight out of mythology. Read more »

› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Ah, spring — it seems like a distant memory in June as we get socked an SF summer's weaving, one-two punch of Westside fog and SoMa heat. But spring is the thing when we think about love. Love that picks us up, brings us down, lifts us back up to where we belong, then bitch-slaps us about the face and neck until we're ready to trade in our valentines for matching straitjackets and a tray of stiff drinks. Read more »

It takes a lot to knock an obsession out of Built to Spill singer-songwriter-guitarist Doug Martsch. Behind the beard, the down-low home life with wife and child, and the phone conversation padded with softly undercutting "Oh, I dunno's," once lay the heart of a raging pickup basketball junkie.
"I kinda got sucked into the NBA play-offs seven or eight years ago," explains Martsch, 37, from his home in Boise, Idaho. Read more »

Before Hedwig was a glimmer in John Cameron Mitchell's eye, before some Bowie-imitation bathhouse spillage bloomed into Velvet Goldmine's Brian Slade, before Freddie Mercury was frightened mid-rhapsody by thunderbolts and lightning, there was Jobriath, the first (and the lost) truly out, gay glam rock star. Read more »